


and just before i leave

by 75hearts



Series: venty lucretia drabbles [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Bulimia, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Eating Disorders, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Insomnia, Vomiting, Whump, trying to tag this as much as i can because seriously i am not kidding this gets graphic on the ED, very graphic you guys please PLEASE take care of yourselves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 10:18:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14042088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/75hearts/pseuds/75hearts
Summary: Lucretia doesn't notice that there's a problem, at first. By the time that she does, she's stopped caring.





	and just before i leave

**Author's Note:**

> please, please take care of yourselves. i realize that i don't have control over you guys, but please do not use this fic to trigger yourselves. if you recognize yourself in this fic at all, and you haven't already gotten help--in whatever form that may take for you--i highly encourage you to, although i recognize that i don't have any real power over you. i'm not quite recovered yet, but being in recovery has helped me so much, and i hope that you can have that same experience.   
> this was written purely to vent; please don't make the same mistakes that lucretia does in this fic. no matter what you're dealing with, it's never too late to learn how to be happy again. as the power bear taught magnus, sometimes the strongest thing you can do is to ask for help.  
> enjoy!!

It starts out innocently. She is busy, so busy, and she simply does not have the time. She doesn’t quite care, either--she is so unimportant and her work is so important, one little girl in the face of every life in every world, and, well, what can one missed lunch hurt anyway?--and one becomes two becomes ten and missed lunch expands into missed breakfasts and snacks until she is eating one full meal a day. Until she is eating one full meal only on a good day.

She doesn’t really notice as it slips away. It’s not exactly intentional. She just needs the time, because her work is critical and her health is simply not. 

Her rests, the hours a day allocated for sleep, slip away too. Every minute filled with food or dreams, she reasons, is a minute not spent fixing things. In the face of the Hunger, she simply can’t justify allowing these little comforts to herself. And maybe, somewhere deep inside, she knows that she doesn’t deserve them. Not with what she did.

When she does want to eat or sleep, she calls Davenport to bring her tea, and the sound of his voice is enough to put her off her appetite. The memories keep her up better than the caffeine.

This is how she realizes: one day, it all becomes too much. She goes, almost by autopilot, her feet taking her even as her mind screamed not to, to the Bureau cafeteria.   
It's late, or maybe early. Almost 3am. The cafeteria is deserted. She hates how much she is grateful for this. She shouldn’t care if people see her eat, but she does. It is dark, but it is not dark enough for her to hide her shame. There is still food there, even at these hours of the morning, just in case anyone needed a midnight snack.

She takes all of it, sweeping it into a bag and turning to leave for her room. Even in this state, she has  _ some  _ shame.

Back at her room, she eats and eats and eats, with a mechanical frenzy. She eats muffins and chocolate bars and cookies and noodles and fruit and washes it all down with so much wine. She cannot quite bring herself to stop until she is out of food.

Finished, she looks down, in horror at herself, not quite believing that she did what she did. _ I didn't deserve this,  _ she thinks, as the dawning disgust seeps through her defenses. _ I still don't. _ Her hands are still sticky with sugar. Her stomach sticks out, distended and bloated, not used to food like this.

She doesn't realize she's crying until her eyes start hurting, stinging hard in her face. She wipes her eyes with the back of one hand, breathing coming too-quick, until suddenly, in a fit of desperation, she sees a way out.

She runs to the bathroom, shame gone again now that she is alone, locks the door. Runs the water, splashes her face. Takes a deep breath. And then she bends over the toilet and sticks two fingers down her throat--farther, farther, down to the first knuckle. It itches, like a stuck popcorn kernel. And then she feels her stomach start to heave. She pulls her fingers out, still shaking, but it does not come. Another deep breath, and her hand goes back down. She doesn't pull it out this time. Not until they are coated in bile and chunks of food, not even close to digested. The fruit comes out first; it doesn't even taste bad coming back up, barely different coming up than going down. Some of it stings, a little, but not badly. She sticks her hand back down. The noodles come out next, and she pulls them out, choking on them as she does, gasping for air, taking heaving breaths. Then the chocolate, brown, bitter bile, like melted baking chocolate mixed with acid strong enough to burn on its way up.

Eventually, she collapses to her knees on the floor, dizzy, covered in tears and stomach acid.

Looking down at her prone body, she is finally able to admit to herself that she has a problem. It is very difficult to stick your hand down your throat until you puke and still remain in denial of that much. But she's also admitted something else: she doesn't care, because, on some level, she believes that she deserves to have a problem.

 

So that was that. The episode didn't change as much as an onlooker might have hoped it would. Instead, it added a level to her clandestine self-destruction. After that first impulsive rush, she became methodological, bringing the same careful systemization to binging and purging that she brought to everything she did. She developed her routine: collecting food at the cafeteria when nobody was there, bringing it back to her room, eating and puking. She alternated hands, minimizing brittle nails and bleeding knuckles as much as she could. The most important thing, she told herself, was that nobody know.

She knows she has to teach herself to be silent about the entire affair. That was the priority, really. If someone heard, it’d all come crumbling down. 

She casts Silence, the first few times, teaching herself, practicing instead of sleeping. She stands above the toilet, choking on her own hands, not letting herself cough, eyes tearing up. She can’t help it; she gags, in a way that would have been audible, before it starts to come up, thick logs of cookies splashing into the water, a rush and a spasm leaving her gasping for air, hand out of her mouth, dizzy and heady, leaning against the wall. Her cheeks are wet, her left hand dripping with bile. She closes her eyes, the trace of a smile playing over her lips. She had held out longer this time, before making noise, and next time she would be even better.

The first time she vomits without making any noise, she’s filled with pride. She watches as it all splashes in the toilet, eyes leaking but mouth silent. She flushes the toilet, goes to the sink, washes her face and hands, splashing cold water on her skin until she feels some level of decent. After that, she doesn’t cast silence, relying on herself to be quiet enough, the whole ordeal silent except for the splash half-digested food makes in the toilet.

On bad days, when her eyes are bloodshot, her glands swollen, her breath smelling like acid and death, her knuckles red and raw, she casts minor illusion or disguise self; she tries to keep it to cantrips and low-level spells, but she certainly wastes more spell slots than she’d care to admit on making herself look normal.

Still, despite all of this, most of the time it is not at the front of her mind. It is a part of her day just like the rest of it, and not even a particularly important part of her day, not like running the Bureau. She can’t let it interfere with the work she does. She’s The Director, here, and she has to undo her mistakes. That’s her first priority, it has to be, and she can’t let herself lose sight of that.

She is so, so tired. She drinks absurd amounts of coffee, all the time. Sometimes black, sometimes ridiculous concoctions that are more sugar than caffeine. She has to keep herself going. It’s amazing, how long the body can keep itself functioning on fumes. She forgets things: forgets what it is like to have a mouth that does not taste of puke, forgets what it is like to feel lively and awake. She knows, still, that she has not forgotten as much as her friends have. She sees Davenport daily; she harbors no illusions that she is the victim in this scenario.

Killian approaches her at one point, face pinched in worry, apologizing for the trouble but the Regulators had been talking and noticed that none of them had ever seen her eat.  Lucretia smiles, slips into her director voice. The words slip from her mouth easier than stomach acid. “Of course, it’s no trouble. My schedule is just off. The long moon days--well, fake moon days, really--will do that to you, you know, and especially with work... I tend to eat at, uh,  _ very  _ odd hours of the day. That’s all. Thank you for your concern, really, but I’m fine. Really.” Killian smiles, face relaxing, and Lucretia smiles back.

Anyway, it’s not  _ entirely  _ a lie, or at least that’s what she tells herself. She does eat, sometimes, and when she does it is rarely on a morning/noon/evening schedule. She eats, and she sleeps, she  _ does _ , and if it’s not quite enough, if it’s maybe a bit more internally motivated than the talk of the absurdly long moon days would imply, then--well. It’s better for everyone, better for the entire world, if her employees stay focused on finding the relics instead of worrying about her. She helped break the world and then she broke her friends and every second is another second where Davenport’s mind is full of static and the relics are out there killing people and she simply cannot see using those seconds for her own needs as anything other than hopelessly selfish. By her own criteria, not only does she eat and sleep sometimes, she eats and sleeps  _ far too much _ . 

(Something, in the back of her mind, points out the seconds she loses in the bathroom getting rid of it all or chanting spells to hide the hoarseness of her voice or planning it all. She pointedly ignores it, pushes the thought away without even letting herself think it.)

The news comes back about another reclaimer lost and she pops a peppermint in her mouth, sucks on it. Plans.

She knows what she needs to do. She sets it up, makes sure that they will all be in town, all see Craig’s List. Pulls the strings that need pulling.

And then she retreats to her office and drinks red wine on an empty stomach, feels the sloshing in her stomach and the dizziness and keeps on going, tears staining her cheeks, until she can almost forget. She loves the drinking, the getting drunk. If she didn’t have work, didn’t need to stay sober and not hungover and fully capable at all times, she would drink a lot more, but as it is, it is her special treat. She cries and cries, and still she does not sleep, watching the real moon from her own poor imitation. She finishes off the bottle, remembers offhandedly that wine has calories, totters over to the sink, throws it up, bitter fluid spraying so fast from her mouth, staining her hands, getting in her eyes. She doesn’t bother to wash her face, just wipes it with her sleeve. Finally, empty and dizzy and drunk, she collapses in bed.

She dreams most nights, nightmares, but not that night. That night, her sleep is deep and dreamless, a black void, and if she were conscious she would be grateful for that much. As it is, she is taking a break from all her emotions, even gratitude, her mind finally, blissfully silent.

The next morning, she wakes up late, the sun already up, and she goes back to work.


End file.
